Academic life under institutional pressures for AACSB accreditation: insights from faculty members in Mexican business schools

Scholars have increasingly recognized how efforts among business schools to attain or maintain accreditation from external agencies (i.e. Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB]) have engendered myriad consequences on the experiences of academic faculty members. Extant research that has investigated this phenomenon empirically has focused on business schools in advanced economy contexts, where such institutions are relatively better endowed – in terms of structural and human capital resources – than their counterparts in less-developed regions. Drawing on a qualitative study on two business schools in Mexico, this article illuminates how academic faculty members recognize and negotiate the intensifying pressures for restrictive forms of research output that is the corollary of their business school’s endeavor to satisfy the scholarly requirements for AACSB accreditation. This article further considers the problematic implications posed by this trend should it continue.